had moved to Las Vegas. He had coincidentally enjoyed a big improvement in his internet speed, and he had learned of the dark web: the sites that sold illegal drugs and guns and even arranged meetings with hit men. And there he had come across someone supposedly selling pieces of the “Perdido Beach Magic Stone.” That’s what the ad had said. A hundred dollars an ounce, to be paid in Bitcoin. He had assumed it was fake, but he gave it a try anyway, and sure enough, a chip of rock had arrived in the mail. He had slept with it under his pillow for a full month before concluding that it wasn’t working, and he’d been on the verge of throwing it out when something told him to try one last thing.
He had practically destroyed the blender. And he’d had to finish the job with a mortar and pestle that left the rock tasting like the basil that had been the previous thing crushed in the mortar. He had gagged it down.
And the next day he had made his brother do things, and his sister go change sweaters three times, and he had made his father go online and order a new and expensive VR headset.
But later that same day he’d gotten into a loud argument with his mother, and he had stormed out of the house and ordered a passing motorist to drive him to the TGI Fridays, where, using his new serpent’s voice, he told the bartender to pour. That was a mistake, clearly, because passed out he had no power at all, obviously, and the result was this drunk tank and this very public revelation of his power. There would be video from the cell, video revealing him as a mutant, one of the so-called “Rockborn,” he was certain, which meant police and who-knew-what government agencies would have his name, address, picture—both of his faces—fingerprints, credit report, and, worst of all, his most recent psych evaluation, which had labeled him a borderline personality—psych-speak for freak. The FBI would be interviewing his “known associates” before the day was out, and they would, to a boy or girl, roll their eyes and retell all the old stories of Dillon the loser, Dillon the freak, Dillon the virgin.
Terrible timing, terrible planning. He had not previously used the power for a violent end, and now that he had, he could expect to be treated no more kindly than the creature who had torn up the Golden Gate Bridge, or the monsters who had blown up the Port of Los Angeles.
The tweaker’s rotting teeth finally came together, and he spit a hunk of bloody pulp from his mouth onto the floor, where it looked like a piece of calf ’s liver. Tattoo, still on hands and knees, looked quizzically at Dillon as if to ask whether he should lap the meat up as well.
Yes, life going forward would not be the life he’d led to this point.
Oh, well.
“I’m out of here, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “You’ve been a great audience, but . . .” He grinned as the old Marx Brothers ditty came back to him, and he sang, “Hello, I must be going. I cannot stay, I came to say I must be going . . .”
There was no applause. He could have made them laugh and applaud, but no, some things were sacred, and he would earn his laughs the hard way, the right way. All the people he admired had been freaks in high school, and they had all become admired and beloved and rich.
David Letterman: $400 million
Jerry Seinfeld: $800 million
“Ta-ta!” he said with a jaunty wave. Then an afterthought: “Oh, you can stop licking the floor now.”
And with that, Dillon Poe—six foot two inches tall and decidedly green Dillon Poe—walked out through the cell gate, down the hall to the open security door, past guards he silenced with a word, past the jail’s grim waiting room, out into the lobby of the county building, and out into brilliant Las Vegas sunlight.
A pretty young woman passing by gave him a definite onceover that was certainly not the way she should have looked at a green, scaly creature with yellow eyes, and he smiled at her in gracious acknowledgment.
Could I work the whole snake thing into my act?
It was mid-morning in Las Vegas. The air was only hot, not blistering, but the sun was blinding, a sharp contrast with what Dillon felt inside. Because in his head he was having visions again, like he had last time he had changed . . . well, maybe not visions, more like voices. Only the voices never spoke.
No, not quite visions or voices, he realized, more like the neck-tingling sense of being watched. It was more than just the faint apprehension you might get when you thought someone on the street was eyeballing you; this was both more real and insistent, and yet impossible to make sense of. It was as if somewhere inside his head was an audience, sitting in complete darkness and absolute silence, watching him act on his own personal stage.
Dillon was an empirical guy, not someone given to mysticism or even religion. He tested things. He sought truth, because all the best comics traded in truth. His suspicion was that the dark and silent audience had something to do with the changes—the morphing, as he had heard it called. So now he tested the hypothesis by de-morphing: by resuming his unimpressive human physique. And sure enough, the invisible audience disappeared.
“Huh,” Dillon said, which a passing homeless person took as an invitation and held out a dirty styrofoam cup.
“Sorry, I don’t have any money,” the now-normal-looking Dillon said.
No money, just power. But Dillon was cynical enough to understand that in much the way that matter and energy are really the same thing, so are money and power. He could make anyone do anything. Anything. Which meant he could have anything he wanted.
He, Dillon Poe, ignored FAYZ survivor, was quite possibly the most powerful person in the world. In light of that, he asked himself: Now what?
And the answer was: Whatever you want, Dillon; whatever you want. The only way now was forward.
| 2 | | | FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS SCREAM ALONE |
“AAAAAHHHH! KILL ME! Kill me, oh, God, please kill me!”
Once upon a time, Malik Tenerife had argued convincingly that the idea of hell, of a place of eternal torment, was nonsense, an impossibility. Sooner or later even being boiled in a lake of fire would get dull and repetitive. After a year? Ten years? A million years?
He knew now the flaw in his argument: it only worked if you experienced time.
Malik did not experience time. Everything was now. Now! NOW! Right now he felt as if he’d been skinned alive and left raw. Right now he felt as if wild beasts had gnawed on him. Right now his brain could barely form a thought before a crashing wave of agony would wipe it away, leaving nothing but screams.
He’d heard some of what the nurses had had to say since Shade and Cruz had rushed him to the hospital. He was vaguely, distantly aware that the shape-shifting chameleon Cruz, assuming several disguises, had been with him throughout. He knew that she had filled the one request he had managed to form and articulate in a single scrawled word on a pad of paper. The word: “Rock.” But to say that Malik knew or thought was a gross exaggeration—Malik’s memory, his thoughts, his essence as a human being were a bunch of scraps swirling in a tornado. He could glimpse but not hold a thought.
Cruz had indeed been with Malik throughout. She had the power to appear as any person she could visualize, and had passed as a doctor, a nurse, an orderly. She had stayed by his side as much as possible because, even though she knew it was nothing compared to Malik’s agony, she had her own problems. When in morph, the Dark Watchers were always with her, always insinuating themselves in her mind. Sometimes she just locked herself in the bathroom, returned to her normal, true form, and cried.
She had given Malik the rock, ground up in a cup of water, and he’d managed to drink it through a straw. And then she had waited.
At